A professor built an AI bot to make teaching easier. Will it replace him someday?

A professor built an AI bot to make teaching easier. Will it replace him someday?

Ashok Goel had run into a problem. As a computer science professor at Georgia Tech, he taught an online course on artificial intelligence, and its 300 students sent in thousands of questions via an online forum each semester. The sheer volume of messages overwhelmed Goel and his eight teaching assistants. So he tried an experiment—quietly inserting some AI into the class itself. This January, with the help of several graduate students and support from IBM’s breakthrough Watson technology, Goel built an AI chatbot that could field basic questions and relieve some of the burden on the class’s human instructors. Named Jill Watson, the virtual “teaching assistant” drew from previous forum data to help answer many routine, technical queries about the course, such as where people could find a certain video…